


storm

by paintedpolarbear



Series: Pynch Week 2017 [4]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish Loves Ronan Lynch, Fluff without Plot, M/M, POV Adam, Post-Canon, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, ronan is a good boyfriend, slightly canon divergent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-11
Updated: 2017-11-11
Packaged: 2019-01-31 19:32:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12688791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedpolarbear/pseuds/paintedpolarbear
Summary: On his first college break, Adam wants nothing more than to come home. Home being the Barns. Home being Ronan.Ronan missed him too.





	storm

 

It’s pretty out, all a riot of fall color, but damn if October doesn't need to hurry up and finish settling in, so the temperature can drop to a more comfortable range.

 

Adam slams the hood of his car, wipes the humidity off his face, and verbally thanks God that it's not raining like everyone had seemed to think it would today. Bad enough to have to replace a timing belt on the fly, in the gravel shoulder of some no-name highway in nowhere-county, Virginia. Adam knows he might have chickened and called a tow at the first sign of raindrops, and his wallet might never have forgiven him.

 

The Hondayota starts as well as it ever does, thank Christ, and Adam turns the cassette over and eases back onto the road. The time makes him groan: if Ronan was driving, he could be back to the Barns in time for lunch like he’d promised. Ronan, however, would also fail to see the risk of driving on a gerry-rigged motivator, so Adam feels justified in maintaining the posted speed limit and trusting that he’ll get there when he get there. He's only lost about three hours to the breakdown, give or take; he just wishes he’d gotten around to getting himself a cell phone at some point, so at least Ronan could know _why_ he's waiting around the house with hi thumbs up his ass.

 

It's still only darkly overcast when Adam pulls into the ruts next to the empty space where the BMW normally lives. Ronan had tried three or four times to convince him to take it with him to U Penn, even gave him a set of keys that worked, despite being obviously dream things, but Adam had refused. It was not that he thought Ronan would really need it, although he would. Even now, Adam maintains a peculiar sort of attachment to the piecemeal car, in the same way one has affection for an ailing pet that one should really take for a last visit to the vet sooner rather than later. Getting himself in the mindset for the car's last rites is still sort of a work in progress.

 

There's a _thunk_ against his driver’s side door that he only notices because it rocks the whole car, and when he opens it Opal goes skidding through the mud.

 

“Adam!” she cries before he's even out of the car. She clambers to her feet and collides with his knees with the full force of her entire tiny body, which is a lot, and he laughs. When he extricates himself from her hug and sets her on his hip, mud slides down his front and onto his shoes.

 

“Gross,” Adam says, wrinkling his nose in an exaggerated fashion, and Opal giggles. As he carries her to the side door, where they can hose off and not track mud in the house, he asks in a very serious tone, “What did you do while I was gone?”

 

At once she's chattering away--half in disjointed English, half in the indecipherable dream language that even Ronan barely understands during waking hours--about feeding goats, building a swing set, “refin...re-refin-nin…polishing floors,” and about a thousand other things that he doesn't catch. He pulls the side door open with his free hand and practically dumps her onto the tile, where she skitters loudly to the wall, giggling the whole way.

 

There's an old-looking spigot jutting from the wall around the height of his knees, with a long hose attached. Adam vaguely remembers a phone conversation he’d had with Ronan shortly after leaving.

 

(“I'm gonna try to--ow, shit--get the mudroom hooked back up to the outside water, so I can actually--mother _fucker_ , hold still--”

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“Little goblin just bit me. She went swimming in the creek--did you know there's a creek? Yeah, me neither--and there’s, like, algae and shit in her hair. Fucker won't go in the bathtub.”

 

“Just hose her off?”

 

“Hence. Mudroom.”)

 

Adam gives the knob an experimental twist and it opens surprisingly easily, letting a gentle stream of lukewarm water come pouring from the hose. Opal goes rigid and closes her eyes: she's clearly aware of what's supposed to come next, and is both resigned to it and dreading it. He’d feel bad, but her eyes are closed so tight that her entire face is dramatically pinched into the center, and she's holding her breath with red, puffy cheeks. It's adorable.

 

She actually tolerates the bath pretty well. As muddy water swirls down the drain, she totters across the room and yanks the nozzle from his hands. He’s too surprised to move when she beans him directly in the chest with the spray.

 

It takes him a second, sputtering and indignant, to grab for the handle and turn the spigot off, and by the time he does, he's soaked to the skin. He gives Opal a pretend-glare that she thinks is hysterical. “That wasn't very nice,” he says. She pokes her tongue out at him, a move she definitely learned from Ronan.

 

He shucks off the uncomfortably wet shirt and his shoes at the exact moment Ronan opens the kitchen door. Ronan immediately flushes, turns around, and shuts it again. He's about to curse up a storm and go traipsing through the house when the door opens and a towel comes sailing through the gap.

 

“Don't go tracking mud on my new floors,” Ronan’s disembodied voice calls from the kitchen. Adam rolls his eyes, drapes the towel over Opal’s head, and follows her and the smell of dinner into the house.

 

Ronan’s at the stove, which is less of a surprise now that Opal’s been FaceTimeing him--sometimes secretly, sometimes not, she has her own rhyme and reason that remains inscrutable for the most part--updates on Ronan’s progress in learning to cook. Over the summer, meals had progressed from burnt omelets and takeout, to palatable quesadillas and paella, to something they could look forward to most evenings. It had become a comfort, especially in the last remnants of August when summer break was winding down, to come back from a late shift and feel his eyes start watering from the leftover fragrance lingering from a dinner cooked hours before. To find a plate still steaming on the counter, and Ronan dozing on the couch, having tried and failed to stay awake, waiting, even after they’d fought. To feel the knot of pride and terror in his chest unwind bit by bit every time that happened. To be a part and witness of Ronan making something good for himself, reclaiming the happiness of his childhood. He feels his chest loosen now just a little more.

 

Ronan turns from whatever he’s making and leans back against the counter, crooks an index finger into Adam’s belt loop, pulls him close. Tentative, almost shy. As though they’re brand-new again, holding each other’s hearts with quivering hands, the fear of failure intermingling with the want. Adam unfolds a tender smile; he lets himself be pulled, and lifts both hands to trace the ink-feathers curling delicately up the sides of Ronan’s neck, up from under his t-shirt.

 

“I missed you,” Ronan says, unnecessarily. His other hand drifts up to Adam’s face, thumb roving along the curve of his jaw. Adam doesn't say anything, just closes his eyes and leans, humming, against the warmth.

 

“How come you got here so late? I thought you were gonna be here for lunch.”

 

“Car broke down,” he murmurs, eyes still closed.

 

“Again? Dude.”

 

And that's the end of it. Adam is a little surprised, mostly pleased, that it hadn't become an argument the moment he opened his mouth. For a while, more and more as the summer went on, it had seemed like that was all they were doing--sometimes coming dangerously close to physically fighting. The subject didn't matter: they were about money, mostly, but they were about insecurity and the future and feelings as well. About everything, after a while. Adam racks his memory but he can't remember whether they’d resolved their last argument or not. He doesn't want to ask, in case they hadn't.

 

The last slat of daylight rolls under a stormcloud, plunging the kitchen into the dim, artificial glow of the fluorescent lights. Ronan’s eyes flicker with the bulb, either expectant of the storm to come or calculating how much longer he can go without replacing the light.

 

Adam tilts inward, dragging his nose along Ronan’s cheekbone, eyelashes on skin. “I missed you too,” he says, more softly than he intended, then: “Something’s burning.”

 

Ronan jerks back with a cuss and whirls to attend the smoking pan, scowling as he tips the ruined contents into the sink. Mumbling something about takeout and scowling again at Adam’s stifled laughter, he scrubs at the pan until Adam noses at the dimple between his shoulder blades and Opal comes clomping back into the kitchen, towel discarded elsewhere in the house.

 

She tugs at the thin fabric of Ronan’s black t-shirt in a silent plea for attention. He makes a display of heaving her into his arms and pretending to be put-upon, but his face is all tenderness, despite the wrinkle in his brow. From this angle, curled like this into his chest, she bears an almost familial resemblance, looking for all intents and purposes like she could be his baby sister, albeit blond and hooved. “ _Quod nobis cenabimus_?” she asks, swinging her legs. Ronan grumbles and replies _When the food gets here, Jesus_. His eyes roll, but he's smiling, as well.

 

Adam’s shivering is now well and truly a byproduct of his wet jeans and bare feet, and he's regretting leaving most of his luggage in the car. The sky looks like it might open up any second now, and he has no desire to soak every last one of his belongings. “I should get dressed,” he says as the outside suddenly entertains the idea of being inside, and the screen door bangs open. God damn but it’s gotten cold.

 

“Asshole. Goes away to a fancy college and suddenly he thinks he's allowed to wear clothes in my house. Education system’s gone to dog shit in this country.” Ronan’s shaking his head and already padding down the hallway, kicking off his ratty sneakers as he goes, leaving them for Adam to step over with practiced ease on his way to the stairs. Chainsaw flutters down from one chandelier or another and digs her claws into Ronan’s shoulder, nipping gently at the shell of his ear.

 

“It's fucking cold in your leaky-ass as shit house, Lynch. This is exposure. People die of exposure.”

 

“ _I'm_ dying from _lack_ of exposure, jack-wipe. You know what I haven't been getting enough of since you left?”

 

“Attention? Exercise?” Adam teases from the safety of the foyer. He knows better than to stay within range of Ronan’s pitching arm: he's learned from experience.

 

“Vitamin D.”

 

The exaggerated wiggling of Ronan’s eyebrows makes Adam chuckle, even as he's sure he's missed the real meaning of the words--fatigue from a half-day’s drive-plus-repair-job is starting to creep in. He skips over the creaky, unfinished bottom step and kicks something sparkly to the floor on his way up.

* * *

”What’re you thinking about?”

 

It takes Adam a second to tear his thoughts away from the fingertips that have been tracing patterns into his skin for an hour. Ronan’s hands are still now, spread loosely under the stained t-shirt that Adam had found crumpled under Ronan’s pillow, but he still feels warm  where he was touched--the bars of his ribcage, the shallow dip of his sternum, the now-permanent crease between his stomach and his hips. He could almost fall asleep, feeling like this. Warm. Safe. Loved.

 

Honesty wins out against the temptation to fall asleep without answering. “You,” he says, tipping his head back against the expanse of Ronan’s shoulder. “I haven't been sleeping very well.”

 

Ronan’s arms tighten around him. His voice is a gravelly whisper. “Me neither. I guess I can't sleep when you're not here.”

 

It’s only the truth. Cabeswater’s sort-of death left a gaping hole under his lungs that still aches whenever it gets the opportunity. The old forest’s mute darkness throbs in the gaps between his ordinary past and his ordinary present. His nightly stroll crossing over the faint pulse of the Henrietta ley line. His fingers brushing against Persephone’s tarot cards in the glove box. Any idle moment when, before, he would have casually leaned his thoughts against the forest’s constant presence in the bottom of his mind, just because it was there, just because he could. The timestamp on his text message to Ronan ticking to one hour ago, two hours ago, three, four, and only silence in reply because his boyfriend can’t be assed to pick up a cell phone.

 

At first, it had been a blinding, deafening wound, raw and ragged and cutting him to the bone. In the moments his thoughts rolled against it, it was hard to remember any other memories existed. Hard to remember he had ever been Adam Parrish, loved, instead of Adam Parrish, powerless. It’s slowly begun to close over, cell by cell, but all too often he still finds himself in danger of falling in.

 

“It’s been a lot harder to dream since….” Ronan trails off and stays quiet for a long minute. Adam knows without being told that _since_ means _the demon_ and he doesn't blame Ronan in the slightest for not naming it. That’s a memory that he’s still keeping at arm’s length, personally. Which is going to come back around to bite him, one of these days, when it blows up into another fight. But not yet. Ronan’s voice is small when he says: “Since you left, too. I’ve been trying but I’m too scared to bring anything back.”

 

The effect on Adam is immediate. “I could go with you,” he offers, pushing up on his hands and craning his head backwards to tuck it into the curve of Ronan’s neck. Ronan’s fingers relax while he settles, but they're quick to fall back into place, tangled in the hem of Adam’s shirt, once he's still. There's a fire flaring in the shaft of his every bone, the inklings of a concrete plan beginning to solidify. Finally, finally, he thinks he might at least be able to point his restless energy in a direction.

 

“Think you could?” Ronan’s deliberate in keeping his voice neutral, even; but he can’t disguise the note of hope. That Adam could follow him to Cabeswater and start fitting pieces together like he’s meant to, rebuild it, remake it from the inside out. _Magician_.

 

If he can. He’s been careful not to even _try_ to scry since....well, since. Without the stabilizing force of Cabeswater keeping him on track, there’s no telling where his soul might wander off to. How long he’d stay away. But there’s a patch of streetlight on the ceiling that flickers like a candle, that he thinks he could scry in, and Ronan’s back to tracing patterns around his belly button and the touch of his hands has always been enough to keep him grounded. So he thinks he might be able to pull it off. Adam summarizes with a one-shouldered shrug.

 

It seems to be good enough for Ronan. “Let’s get going, then,” he says, dropping his leg off the edge of the couch and sinking farther into the pillows, getting relaxed enough to sleep. “Before you chicken out.”

 

Adam snorts and rolls his eyes, but then he fixes on the streak of light on the ceiling that wavers and flickers and flares, and he feels the familiar drop of his stomach like he’s falling, and then he _is_ falling and--

 

“It wasn’t like this last time I was here.”

 

He looks up and around. He’s climbing off his ass in a clearing that calls to mind words like _cathedral_ , closed in as it is by the immense trunks, the dense undergrowth, the bare branches that seem to reach out to grab hold, the soft carpet of leaves gone colorless in the night. Ronan’s standing just off to the side, the moonlight making a halo of the dark fuzz on his scalp, his hands in his pockets and his head tipped back to look between the tips of branches at the sky. He’s clearly restless but not agitated. Curious, but not afraid.

 

It takes him a moment to realize what Ronan’s talking about. The trees are _speaking:_ _tibi est, tibi est, redisti, manibi nostri oculi nostri tibi est tibi est tibi est--_

 

His breath snags on something deep, deep, deep.

 

The forest’s voice isn’t like how Adam remembers--it’s like the echo of a whisper, right there in his ear. This close, this soft, he strains to catch the words, struggles to hear them as more than just the rustling of invisible leaves in a nonexistent wind. The murmurs quiver through his deaf ear, trickle down the back of his neck and across his hairline. Breath ghosting on his cheek. The hair on his arms is standing straight up, the skin prickling with nervous goosebumps. Without thought, his hands reach up for the nearest trunk, pressing into the bark. Its warmth pulses like a heartbeat; a lump rises in his throat.

 

_Oh_ , he thinks. _I missed you_.

 

“I think it missed you.” Ronan’s hand is a living weight on his shoulder, solid and _real_ in the way dreams never are, fingers brushing bare skin--somehow, wires got crossed in between the living room and the clearing and he ended up shirtless and barefoot for the second time in a day--but Ronan himself looks like he could be something out of a dream. He looks more like Cabeswater than he used to. Or the forest looks more like him.

 

“You--” Adam hastily scrubs a tear track from his cheek and cuts himself off with an incredulous giggle. “You’re remaking it.”

 

“Slowly,” Ronan is quick to clarify. “Piece by piece. I have to make sure it all works right before I make it bigger. Fuck. It was so much easier when I didn't have to think about it.” He drags a hand down his face, looking lost. The words aren’t muffled at all by his fingers, not in this dreamspace. “But I think it’s rebuilding itself as much as I’m building it, too. Look.”

 

He follows Ronan’s gaze into the branches and on up. There, between the black threads of bare branches, is the full moon, swollen to three times its real size and glowing silver-gold--and the sky, stippled with brilliant constellations.

 

He scrubs away more tears.

 

“The stars are new,” Ronan continues. He sounds remarkably calm for someone who’s been reconstructing a county-sized spiritual entity from almost scratch for--how long has he been at this? Since April? With any luck he's had the common sense to at least try to work repairs on the ley line, too. “I don't think they're real, either.”

 

Adam looks. “You're right,” he murmurs, his eyes darting between the unfamiliar stars, trying to make sense of their arrangement. “I don't recognize any of these constellations.” He lifts his hands to measure the distance between one bright point and the next: “Do you think they're real constellations, though, just maybe from another time? Like fifty thousand years ago, or a million years from now? That looks like Altair but it's supposed to be way over here….”

 

A breeze kicks up, stirring the moss--grass? Ferns?--around his ankles and knocking branches together like chimes. The rustling sounds like laughter, fond and affectionate, a hand brushing his forehead. Ronan just smiles.

 

“We should probably get going,” Adam says after a while. The scaly birch under his palms feels warm but tired, like it's been awake for too many hours, and the rest of the glen is misted with the same exhaustion. He has no doubt their presence is contributing. Cabeswater murmurs its reluctant agreement: So sorry, visiting hours are over, he needs to rest, come back tomorrow.

 

He looks over at Ronan when he gets no response,and sees that he’s not even paying attention, instead rooting around in the mud by some bushes, hands buried in the dark, rich earth. Adam sees now that behind the first layer of trees is a stand of willows, roots tangled in the bank of an endless black river. 

 

Whatever it is he’s digging for comes free with a quiet _pop_ and he looks up at Adam with equal parts pride and childish glee. Adam raises one eyebrow by millimeters. But he extends a hand to help Ronan off the ground.

 

Most of the time, when Adam dreams--in the ones that don't end with a scene from an R-rated movie, anyway--it's first contact that knocks him awake. Knuckles brushing, a handshake, the solid knock of ankle against ankle; the meeting of one pulse to another. The moment of transition from: dream, to: real. One second ethereal, cerebral, senseless; the next cold, sensory, sure.

 

This time, Ronan takes his hand and hauls himself up and they stay, briefly: two real things in a dream world, the kiss of palm on palm, one electrified pulse, the solid bite of body heat, sweat--

 

and they both hang suspended for part of a second, in the balance of momentum between _down_ and _up_ \--

 

and it's the moment between letting off the clutch and tearing into the gas, like a hitched breath--

 

and in the moment of the catch Adam blinks into the popcorn ceiling of Ronan's living room, Ronan’s hand curled up in his, something from Cabeswater clutched in Ronan’s hand.

 

“Huh,” he says out loud, both because it’s true--that had been different, less ugly-demon-corruption-murder than he’d half expected, half feared--and because he knows Ronan, awake, can hear him.

 

It takes a minute for Ronan to stir beneath him and gain enough control of his body to open his hand. When he does, the _something_ tips into Adam’s lap: palm sized, silvery-brown, smooth and soft as river silt, blank and shallow in the middle, thick and carved around the edge with leaves, vines, branches, constellations that don't exist anywhere else.

 

“What is it?” Adam asks, voice low and reverent. He picks it up and turns it over between his fingers, admiring the weight of it, how it looks almost-clumsily hand sculpted yet the carvings are more intricate and detailed than anything he’s seen. He can pick out the fine serrations on the edges of leaves, the textured bark of the twiggiest branches, the smallest hairs on the tips of vines. Ronan doesn't say anything; he doesn't have to. It's obvious what it's supposed to be.

 

His breath isn't quite making it all the way down into his lungs; he keeps having to stop and coax it the rest of the way in.

 

(The echo of a whisper, right there in his ear, sleepy and warm, as he rests his thumb in the depression in the center of the rock, right where it's supposed to be, like coming home.) 

 

Adam’s eyes fog with unexpected tears. God, he wasn't going to cry. He wasn't. But there it is.

 

“It works anywhere,” Ronan whispers, his lips brushing Adam’s temple. Back to drawing patterns with his fingertips, under the shirt. “So you don't have to be on the ley line all the time. And you don't have to worry about losing it ‘cause it'll always end up in your pocket--”

 

Adam doesn't mean to, but he cuts Ronan off with one almost-hysterical sob, then another. Almost shaking, almost shuddering apart at the magnitude of this gift--Ronan’s probably the one person on Earth who grasps exactly how much this means to Adam. How big the hole inside his chest it fills. Ronan’s grip just tightens on him, and they eventually fall asleep again, too wrapped up in each other's warmth to do anything but.

 

In the morning, Adam wakes to sunlight and piercing the curtains and Ronan swearing thickly. The air smells very strongly of roses.

 

Adam blinks his eyes open to find that the living room is buried under a snowbank of multicolored wildflowers.

 

He blinks again.

 

Ronan grumbles, “Jesus Christ, _we get it_ ,” and Adam laughs uncontrollably until Opal comes stomping down the stairs to demand breakfast, and the rock in the pocket of his sweats is warm and heavy and exactly where it's supposed to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Pynch Week 2017  
> Day 5: "Dreamscape"
> 
> ...very, very tardily written...
> 
> Non-canon-compliant merely in that Cabeswater was Only Mostly Dead all along, which is hardly non-canon anyway.
> 
> Drop a review if you liked it!


End file.
